At the young age of eleven, a veil had been drawn back to reveal to me an altogether alien reality. I came to know that the dead did indeed live in a dimension I could not see. This realisation reinforced my belief in God because it was His power that had finally laid old Rose finally to rest. Those two exorcists truly carried divine power into our home that day, in their healing hands and trusting hearts. They asked nothing in return, but every prayer I have said since contains an acknowledgement of the selfless love their act demonstrated to me.
What had visited us all those years ago? It’s common knowledge that the word poltergeist derives from the German poltern, to knock, and Geist, ghost. Our visitor answered most of the criteria attributed to such phenomena: the activity started and stopped suddenly, it lasted for a number of weeks, it always occurred when a particular individual or agent – my brother John – was present, and it was most active during the hours of darkness.
But what reinforces for me the notion that it was indeed the ghost of our great-aunt is the fact that in many cases the spirits of the dead will knock and scratch and move heavy objects. Mischievous and malevolent energies, on the other hand, are characterised by breakages, the throwing of light objects, or physical assault on, or the possession of, the agent.
I cannot accept the theory proposed in the 1930s that poltergeist activity is caused by sexual conflicts generated during the onset of puberty: projections of repressed emotions, such as anger and hostility. The writer Stephen King further enlarged this idea in his novel Carrie and in the film of the same name. In King’s fiction the teenage Carrie, victim of a repressed upbringing and bullying classmates, finally unleashes all her anger by the power of telekinesis.
Yes, my siblings and I were all either approaching or experiencing puberty; and yes, we were an unhappy bunch of fearful, confused children. Yet it’s difficult to believe that a nine-year-old boy could either deliberately or unconsciously cause such upheaval. The theory of ‘repression’ mooted by psychologists has since been rejected by some eminent researchers in the field, who have gathered enough convincing evidence to drive a coach and horses through the hypothesis.
Dr Martin Israel, a clergyman and senior lecturer in pathology at the University of London, believes that spirits are rarely evil, but are entities confused and trapped within the aura of a living person. (The aura is a subtle emanation that surrounds all living things and provides a host for occult phenomena.) Dr Israel asserts that such entities are family members or friends of the victim, trying to complete their business on the earthly plane.
Given what I know about Great-aunt Rose and the nature of her life, it does not surprise me that she had unfinished business to attend to.
The timing of this visitation is significant also. The spirit showed up on 31 October. For the ancient Celts this day – Hallowe’en, or Samhain – was the most sacred of all their festivals, a solar feast dedicated to the Lord of the Dead. They believed that on the eve of Samhain (Oíche Shamhna) the dead arose and roamed abroad, creating mischief by blighting crops and causing chaos in homes up and down the land. The Celts also held that the veil between this world and the next was at its frailest at Samhain, making it easier for dead and living to communicate with one another.
But what I find most interesting about the Celtic mythology is that, during the darkest hours of the night – in our case around 3am – the Lord of the Dead was believed to summon all lost souls in order that their sentences in the hereafter might be reviewed. Often this meant that condemned souls were destined to spend 12 months on the earthly plane in animal form.
I have stressed ‘animal form’ because it’s intriguing and very curious how the animal motif figures in all this. There was the goat that drove us to our great-aunt’s door; the invisible dog or goat that my mother felt moving on the bed; finding our dog Carlo dead the morning following the exorcism. Bizarre coincidences or evidence of an ancient truth? God alone knows.
Why John? It has been well documented that spirits will attach themselves to the spirit of an innocent child in order to cleanse and purify themselves; in much the same way we attach ourselves to saints, or a favoured relative who has ‘passed over’, to help us and guide us here on the physical plane. Do we know what we set in train when we pray thus, and what turbulence we create in the ethereal regions with our petitions and requests?
Perhaps Great-aunt Rose knew that by beseeching the youngest and purest mind she would get the response she craved and get it quickly. We prayed as much for John’s deliverance as we did for hers. She released him when she’d finally found release herself. It took an enormous amount of effort and prayer to bring this about. Is it too much to assume that refusing to be loving in this life guarantees unrest in the next? And if this is the case then why do so many of us find it so difficult to make the qualities of love and goodness the mainstay of our lives here?
THE MASTER AND THE PROVO
Two months after the exorcism I sat the eleven-plus examination. I did not make the grade; my concentration had suffered as a result of the ‘visitor’. The homework, during the period of haunting, rarely got completed and Master Bradley administered the beatings as usual. The burden of not being able to explain to him the real reason for my negligence was yet another injustice to be borne.
At any rate the Master had not encouraged success in the classroom. Lisnamuck primary school inspired neither confidence nor excellence in its pupils. Since we were mostly the progeny of farmers and labourers it was assumed that the collective aspirations of parents and pupils were not very high. This unspoken ethos excused abysmal teaching methods and crushed the hopes of an untold number of bright pupils.
The priest, the doctor and teacher had absolute power in those days. No one challenged their despotic status within the rural community. My parents accepted without question the brutality of the Master. Those frequent episodic sicknesses, sore heads and sore stomachs that excused us from school were viewed as a malingering tactic rather than with the concern they deserved. It never seemed to occur to my elders that such obvious ‘unhappiness’ must have had far deeper psychological roots. My father had been beaten by his own teacher and he reasoned that what was good enough for him was good enough for his offspring. We stopped looking for his sympathy when we discovered, to our great dismay, that his general response was to give us a further clout for having ‘upset the Master’ in the first place.
Mother, being a woman, was more disposed to discussion than attack. Never once, however, did she bring the Master to task. He was left to continue his sadistic practices while his innocent pupils bent and buckled under the tyranny.
The torture did finally end – in June 1971 – when I left that awful school and the ire of Master Bradley for good. The scourge had been expunged from my life, but the damage to my psyche would take longer to heal.
However Master Bradley was not the only teacher employed in the ritual abuse of pupils at that time; my Uncle Robert, also a headmaster, was dishing out the same brutality to the innocents of Altyaskey, another parish school in the vicinity of Draperstown.
Robert, my father’s older brother, had been the chaperon on my parents’ honeymoon and their ‘spirited’ tour guide to the sites of Dublin. He had also been confidant to Great-aunt Rose and, as such, bursar to the family fortune. Much of his income derived from two establishments of alcoholic refreshment in Draperstown. Both pubs were bequeathed to him by his Uncle Mark – Rose’s brother – on his demise. Apart from all this, he owned three farms, even though he would have had difficulty distinguishing a turnip from a sprout.
He had a real talent for attracting money into his bank account, did Robert. He was always in the right place at the right time, somehow contriving to be near a ‘profitable’ deathbed and guiding a trembling hand in its final scrawl. As the occupant croaked himself into the hereafter Robert would emerge into the light of day, a triumphant smile softening his stern face.
My uncles rarely smiled. It was as if to do so sho
wed weakness. Worse still, it might have indicated a willingness to forget themselves completely and part with some of their precious cash. Money was for hoarding, not for spending or – God forbid – giving away. So they lived their lives:
Keeping the soul unjostled,
The pocket unpicked,
The fancies lurid,
And the treasure buried.
Robert, though, in his defence, proved to have a wealthy store of knowledge as well as money. He was an avid absorber of literature, had astonishing retentive powers for precise figures and facts and – what impressed me most – he carried around a repository of grammatical knowledge that would have put the most learned linguist to shame. I had reason to mine this seam when during a university course I sought his sagacity in differentiating the properties of the transitive and ditransitive verb. He solved the mystery with a studied casualness that impressed me no end. Oliver Goldsmith would have recognised his sort:
The village all declar’d how much he knew;
’Twas certain he could write, and cipher too:
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And e’en the story ran that he could gauge.
It was clear to me that he possessed a prodigious intellect; yet he chose to live, for purely monetary reasons, an irrational life. Intelligence and common sense did not sit comfortably in his head. As for spirituality, well how could it even get a look in? Oh yes, he went to mass and attended to his duties, so to speak; the actor on that votary stage ‘receiving’ every Sunday. Sure what would the neighbours say if a man missed mass? A body could not be seen to be lying in his bed on a Sunday of all days, boys a dear.
Indeed earlier in life Robert had actually contemplated the religious life. At 18 he had aspirations for the priesthood and was sent to Maynooth College to realise them. I do not believe this to have been a genuine vocation. Personally I never saw him display those attributes – love, kindness and compassion for one’s fellow man – which surely must be uppermost in one who wishes to answer such a calling. However, in those less enlightened days, a family’s reputation was greatly enhanced if a son or daughter submitted to the dog-collar or wimple. I am sure lots of bullying was carried out – vocation or not – by those parents eager to acquire that pious sheen of respectability.
After two years Robert left Maynooth, and went to college in London to study English, emerging four years later with a passport into the teaching profession. The reluctant prelate was to become the hesitant schoolmaster.
Yet, for all his achievements, the most enduring image I have of him is of his substantial presence blocking our kitchen doorway. He’d lean against the frame, the thumb of his left hand tucked under a lapel, like an Old Bailey barrister about to deliver a crucial summing up, observing mother as she laboured in the kitchen. She rarely sat down to talk to him. She was always busy – baking, cooking or washing – and the Master seemed to have all the time in the world. In retrospect I think she should have told him to bugger off, but she didn’t dare.
He had a perpetual air of unease about him, and I sense this was due to the fact that in 40 years he had not allowed a penny to be spent without regretting it. Unfortunately he carried around the evidence of each of those painful transactions in his long face, his overbearing stance and his eagerness to eschew all those social occasions where he might be required to part with a bob or two: the parish hall jumble sale, the variety concert for political prisoners, mutual congress with a fellow drinker over a pint in the pub.
You could feel the chary diction running through him: ‘Give them an inch and they’ll be in on top of me, cleaning me out of house and home and land and all my folding money, and then where would a body be atall, atall?’
So the guard was always on duty about his person; he might as well have hung a ‘keep out’ sign round his neck.
Uncle Robert might have been rich by anyone’s standards but his fortune was rarely debited, even for necessary items. He drove cars and wore clothes until they literally fell apart. He had a ‘funeral’ suit and a suit for everyday wear. Over each he’d put on a grey raincoat, buttoned to the neck even on the hottest day. Though this layer of plastic acted as protection from the elements, I suspect that its primary function was to conceal a rather cavalier attitude towards personal hygiene.
Following the passing of his Aunt Rose, Robert moved from the house he shared with his brothers James and Edward into the cottage he’d inherited from her. Edward joined him there soon after, having discovered that he couldn’t live in amity with the fussy James. James, for his part, was more than happy to be rid of both brothers; now he could lay sole claim to the bleak dwelling that was the parental home.
My uncles were like feral cats in the face of their diminishing kin, coveting all they could from the recent dead to the detriment of a weaker sibling. They all lived and languished and died in the place of their birth, fearing that to stray into the wider world to live constructive, fulfilling lives would mean a smaller share of the spoils in the end. So they chose to stay stuck, frozen in a permanent winter, waiting to move in for the kill, no matter how long it took, willing another to die first and blaming everyone but themselves for the fatuous choices they had made.
I have never understood this. Surely life should be about changing and progressing and righting the wrongs of past generations, rather than repeating their transgressions. However, lessons are not so easily learned when one chooses to remain blind to the needs of others.
After he retired from teaching – and making life thoroughly miserable for the pupils of Altyaskey primary school – Robert continued an existence of structured monotony. Each morning he would drive his blue Ford Anglia at a steady pace to Draperstown, his white hands clutching the steering wheel in a firm ten-to-two grip, the eyes steady on the road ahead. He took his vehicle and his life seriously, not wanting to lose either prematurely. He had too much money to look after, and this responsibility had nurtured a keen sense of self-preservation.
It became an obsession with him. He admitted to mother once that, before using a pedestrian crossing in Belfast, he preferred to wait until a good crowd had gathered; then he’d ‘get well into the middle of them’ before crossing. He reckoned that if you happened to be on the margins you ran the chance of being clipped and tossed by a reckless motorist. And then where would a man be atall, atall?
On rare occasions mother would send me with Robert to Draperstown to buy some item she’d forgotten or was low on, such as tea or sugar. You might wonder why the Master couldn’t have run the errand himself. It never seemed to occur to him to offer, and mother was probably too timid to ask.
I hated those tense, silent journeys. He had the annoying habit of halting before corners and sounding the horn several times before moving on. Once, I had the temerity to ask him why, and he took his hands from the wheel.
‘See, if I didn’t do that,’ he said in all earnest, ‘a young gype could be round that corner like the divil, and could be into us like that.’ He stressed the last word with a loud clap of the raised hands.
There were many corners between Robert’s house and Draperstown so the jaunt was a lengthy one. You could have walked there and back faster.
Sadly that Anglia would never realise its dashing potential under Robert’s guidance. On finally reaching the town he’d crawl onto High Street and devote all his energy to the formidable act of parallel parking. This was a complicated business involving much mirror work and signals, the head roving from side to side, gauging distances and checking for those ubiquitous ‘young boys’ who were all, he’d convinced himself, out to do him damage. The steering wheel would be twisted and fed through his powerful hands, and all the while the rustling raincoat swished and swore in protest.
Robert’s own grocery list reflected the lacklustre menu he and Edward enjoyed every day: bread and butter, bacon and eggs, sausages, potatoes and milk. He marched from greengrocer to butcher to baker, conducting the transactions over exchanges of g
ossip concerning the weather, politics, and who had died – or was about to. Being the schoolmaster he was accorded the same respect as the doctor and the priest; this daily intercourse with the town’s shopkeepers was the pivot on which his whole day turned.
He’d buy the Irish News last and, after he’d stowed the provisions in the boot of the car, would sit and scan the obituaries column for news of God’s most recent withdrawals from life’s great piggy bank. All the adults around me – my parents included – took a morbid interest in death. This had little to do with the contemplation of their own mortality, because if it had then they would surely have led more productive and happy lives, packing in as much as possible before the final curtain. To paraphrase Dr M Scott Peck: In order to learn how to live, we have to come to terms with our own death, because our death reminds us of the limit of our existence. Only when we become aware of the brevity of our time can we make full use of that time.
When Robert scanned the deaths column, Dr Peck’s reasoning did not figure. He was hoping to discover a name he knew. His joy lay in being the first to impart the ‘bad news’ to mother or the neighbours and observe their shock. There was satisfaction to be had in relaying the sad tidings just so long as they didn’t affect the bearer. Such are the compensations of an empty life.
That newspaper was not only fodder for his morbid curiosity but had an astonishing assortment of other functions. Yellowing copies were employed as seat covers in the car. More pages protected the table at meal times, and he used others to light the fire, and dry the dishes. I don’t doubt that it also did duty as toilet roll in the outside privy, although I cannot confirm this, having neither need nor inclination to visit it.
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress Page 11